After one year since the launch of the Wii, Nintendo is unable to keep up with customer demand. While some conspiracy theorists believe that Nintendo may be creating a shortage as a sales tactic, it’s more plausible the game maker underestimated demand for the Wii.

With the hot holiday buying season here, Nintendo fully knows that demand for its Wii console is higher than ever. Speaking to Next-Gen, Nintendo marketing chief George Harrison said that production rate of Wii is now greater than ever.

“We’re at a rate now worldwide of about 1.8 million Wiis produced every month, and that’s going to sustain itself until we get on top of this,” said Harrison. “We’re trying to make decisions on almost a weekly basis about which market to ship the product to, because in Japan it’s a big success, and same in Europe ... It’s almost an embarrassment of opportunity in terms of where to place those Wii hardware units.”

Despite injecting 1.8 million Wiis into the market every month, don’t expect the console to be easily seen sitting idly on retailer shelves. “We’re still expecting some shortages in December,” revealed Harrison. “So even though we’ll be selling everything we can get, we’ll continue full-blast with our outreach through PR, and through paid advertising and other things.”
This isn’t the first time Nintendo has warned the public of potential supply shortfalls, as the company’s American president Reggie Fils-Aime said in a previous story that “it is still going to be difficult to get your hands on the Wii” this holiday season.

The Wii isn’t the only system that Nintendo is selling with super impressive numbers – the DS handheld is just behind the Wii in monthly sales in the U.S. “For DS, we think there’s still a huge amount of potential left. We’re barely at half of the life-to-date sales that we achieved on our last generation of Game Boy,” Harrison added.